Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Even by Trump standards, it was a rough week.

Russia breaks Russia news. Trump spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin this week, in an unscheduled call that is public knowledge in the United States only because Russian state-run media reported on it. The White House did not announce the call or acknowledge it until it was outed by the Putin regime.

Trump is extremely sensitive to the fact that Russia's criminal interference on his behalf in the 2016 elections creates the perception that he is beholden to Putin, so even normal intergovernmental contacts between the US and Russia are affected. Trump seems to have decided that the answer is more secrecy regarding his and his administration's Russian contacts. 

The Putin regime, however, which benefits first and foremost from a weakened American government, has delighted in publicizing its meetings with Trump. Last month, a Russian intelligence chief who was already on the sanctions list--meaning he could not legally be admitted to the US under normal circumstances--met with American officials. Since Sergey Naryshkin was likely involved in the very criminal conspiracy that supported Trump, the Trump administration was anxious to keep the meeting secret, but the Russian Embassy itself tweeted out news of the visit.

Paying for sex (I). This week, Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen admitted that he paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000--or, rather, that he "facilitated payment" to her through a Delaware LLC. Daniels had told several media outlets the story of her sexual encounter with Trump early in his marriage to Melania, but recently was subject to a nondisclosure agreement that prevented her from repeating them. (Daniels' lawyer believes that Cohen's acknowledgement of the payment violates that agreement, and says that she will once again confirm the affair and the lengths that Trump went to in order to conceal it.)

Paying for sex (II and III). Also this week, former Playboy model Karen McDougal confirmed to journalist Ronan Farrow that she had written an eight-page account of her sexual encounters with Trump (during his most recent marriage), for which Trump offered to pay her money. McDougal also said that she had been subsequently paid by a Trump ally in the publishing industry for the exclusive rights to the story of any physical relationship she had ever had with any "then-married man."

McDougal is not well known, and Trump is the only "then-married man" she has ever been linked to. The contract for her story--which prevents her or anyone else from telling it--is with a company owned by David Pecker. Pecker is a close friend and political ally of Trump's, and the publisher of the National Enquirer, which has used the "catch and kill" technique of buying up unflattering news about Trump before.

Farrow's article includes the revelation that Trump reportedly had a sexual encounter with a third adult entertainer, Jessica Drake, and offered her $10,000 for "her company."

Trump's extramarital affairs are arguably a private matter, but the fact that he has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal them is problematic. Anything that Trump wanted badly enough to keep secret that he was willing to go to such elaborate lengths and expense to do so, is something that he can be blackmailed with. 

It remains unclear if, or how many other times, Trump's network of lawyers and publishers have swung into action to conceal his sexual encounters.

Golf alternative. Normally, Trump's aides work hard to keep reporters from being able to say with absolute certainty that Trump spent the weekend golfing--sequestering his press pool miles away from the golf courses he visits, putting reporters in rooms and then taping trash bags to windows, or even planting trees to prevent tiny glimpses of the course from being visible from public streets.

But in the wake of the mass murder in Parkland, Florida--very close to Trump's weekend home in Palm Beach--the Trump White House went out of its way to say that Trump would not be golfing, "out of respect" for the victims.

Instead of golfing, after a 20-minute appearance with first responders on Friday, Trump went to a literal disco dance party.

Imaginary factories. On Tuesday, Trump congratulated himself on a GM factory in Detroit that appears to exist only in his imagination. Speaking from the White House, Trump said this:

GM in Korea announces a first step in necessary restructuring. They're, um, going to, GM Korea company announced today that it will cease production and close its --- plant in may of 2018 and they're going to move back to Detroit. You don't hear these things, except for the fact that Trump became president, believe me, you wouldn't be hearing that. So they're moving back from Korea to Detroit.

But, as a spokesperson for General Motors confirmed, there are no plans to open a plant in Detroit, or move any of the jobs from the closing Korean plant there.

Trump frequently invents fake jobs in order to take credit for creating them.

School shootings means no Russia probe. Last night, Trump tweeted that the reason the FBI couldn't prevent the mass murder in Parkland was that they were too busy investigating the Russian attack on the 2016 election.

Whether Trump likes it or not, the FBI is a major part of the United States' counterintelligence capabilities. The agency overall has approximately 35,000 employees. The ones involved in processing firearm background checks are not interchangeable with the ones investigating attacks by foreign government on the United States.

Why do these things matter?

• A president who can't act independently of a hostile foreign power is unfit for the office.

• Americans should have to rely on Russia for information about its own government.

• It's bad if the president is vulnerable to blackmail.

• It's neither legal nor respectful to offer to pay a woman for sex.

• Trading one form of leisure for another does nothing to "honor" mass murder victims.

• Presidents should not lie about accomplishments that don't exist.

• It's a problem if a president treats literally everything on his agenda, no matter how unrelated, as a way to escape from an ongoing criminal investigation.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Name-calling. On Monday, Trump called Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) "one of the biggest liars and leakers." Schiff is the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes, and was about to put Trump in the awkward position of declassifying a Democratic-authored memo that undid Trump's claims of political persecution by his own FBI. (Trump, who approved the release so-called Nunes Memo without reading it and over the objections of his own FBI and DOJ, ultimately decided to simply refuse to allow any Democratic response based on the same classified sources.)

There is no evidence that Schiff has leaked classified information--and in fact, Trump seems to be the only one even making the claim.

Executive time. Schiff responded by noting that Trump's tweet came during "executive time," and asking him to get back to work. "Executive time" is how the White House internally refers to the nebulous and ever-growing blocks of unscheduled time on Trump's schedule for which no information about Trump's agenda, even in general terms, is provided. Trump spends much of his "executive time" in the White House residence, watching TV and sometimes tweeting from bed, as he recently admitted.

But while Trump's morning and evening twitter-rants are a predictable feature of the calendar, they're not limited to "executive time," as his tweeting this week made clear. On Wednesday, he issued an all-caps blast: "NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!" (The bombshell in question was that then-President Obama had asked to be kept informed on the unfolding investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 election.) 

Reporter Kyle Griffin noticed that Trump's tweet came at 11:10 A.M., when he was supposed to be--and presumably was--in the middle of an intelligence briefing.

Presidential "daily" "briefings." This week, the Washington Post provided two pieces of context that help explain why Trump was tweeting during his daily intelligence briefings: that he refuses to do the reading for them, and often skips them altogether. In fact, Trump's ability to sit through the briefings--which are designed to be the most efficient way of delivering critical intelligence summaries to the president--shows the same pattern as his ballooning "executive time:" he is starting them later, skipping them more often, and frequently tweeting during them.

Parade-planner-in-chief. Trump's fascination with military parades--ostensibly like the one he saw for Bastille Day in France, but as described more like a Soviet-era display--was renewed this week. The White House confirmed this week that Trump has directed the Pentagon, which is normally more concerned with readying tanks and missiles for battle than for parade, to prepare such a parade for Washington, D.C. 

Public opinion generally ran against Trump--retired military veterans tended to have the sharpest criticisms--but the very next day after the news broke, he did get a kind of support from an unlikely ally: North Korea, which held a pre-Olympics show of force in the form of a parade. On Thursday, 10,000 DPRK troops marched stiff-legged behind tanks and trailers carrying the very same long-range missiles (capable of reaching the United States) recently developed by North Korea.

If Trump has thought better of his plans, he does not appear to have told the Pentagon.

Why are these bad things?

• It's wrong to accuse people of things they haven't done.

• The test of whether something should be classified is not whether or not it will help the president politically.

• A president unwilling or unable to put in a full day's work should resign.

• Listening to and (if possible) understanding the day's intelligence reports is a more important use of a president's time than Twitter.

• Holding military parades solely for the purpose of creating good optics for the ruling regime is what authoritarians do.

Sunday Week in Review, Best People Edition

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

He had some trouble with "the best people." 

His new drug czar. Taylor Weyeneth is Trump's deputy chief of staff for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The ONDCP is the agency principally responsible for coordinating the administration's response to the opioid crisis, meaning that Weyeneth has enormous responsibilities. Trump has previously been criticized for dumping that task on two fantastically underqualified appointees--Jared Kushner (his son-in-law) and Kellyanne Conway (his former pollster). 

Weyeneth is a 24-year-old who was recently fired from an entry-level job at a law firm because, as it was reported this week, he simply didn't show up for work. He does have some experience that might endear him to Trump, though--he was a volunteer for the Trump campaign and has helped to organize golf tournaments.

Drug overdoses kill more than 150 Americans every day.

His personal lawyer. Michael Cohen has served as Trump's lawyer since long before the campaign, and is entrusted with sensitive and personal tasks. One of them, the Wall Street Journal discovered this week, was to charter a limited liability corporation in Delaware for the sole purpose of making a $130,000 payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels. Delaware is a popular choice for single-purpose corporations like this because its laws do not require disclosure of the names of the people involved, but Cohen did not fully take advantage of that privacy, allowing the WSJ to link him to the paperwork establishing "Essential Consulting LLC," as the vehicle was known.

Trump and Daniels had a sexual encounter in 2006, shortly after the birth of Trump's youngest son to Melania Trump, she told In Touch magazine in 2011. The magazine apparently decided that publishing the interview, which included graphic and unflattering details about then-private citizen Trump, was not worth the trouble of having to defend against the inevitable threat of a libel suit.

If there is an explanation for a company being created by Donald Trump's lawyer to pay $130,000 to a porn actress that doesn't involve payment for her silence over his extramarital sex with her, neither Cohen nor Trump seems interested in giving it.

A number of other media outlets had been independently pursuing the Daniels story during the 2016 campaign, but were unable to get Daniels' cooperation because the rights to the story had been bought by the tabloid National Enquirer, which then refused to publish it. The Enquirer's publisher is a personal friend and political supporter of Trump's.

His Russia probe defense lawyer. Cohen was not the only Trump lawyer who stumbled on the job this week. In this week's episode of a CBS News podcast, Ty Cobb said that Trump would likely be interviewed by independent counsel Robert Mueller at some point. This is neither surprising nor especially damning, but what Cobb said next--that he was concerned Mueller would be laying a "perjury trap" for Trump--was.

A perjury trap is when a prosecutor asks a question in the belief that the subject will lie. Since it is illegal to lie under oath or to obstruct an investigation, the lie itself becomes a crime. It is impossible to "trap" someone who is telling the truth, or simply refusing to answer on Fifth Amendment grounds.

In other words, Cobb was saying that he was afraid Trump will not be able to stop himself from lying. He's hardly the only one who thinks so, but it's not clear what benefit saying so publicly will have for his client.

His chief of external affairs for the CNCS. Trump appointed Carl Higbie in 2017 to run public outreach for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). Higbie had no experience in the role, but was a campaign surrogate and fundraiser.

He resigned this week after CNN found that he had said that black women "think breeding is a form of government employment," that black people had "lax morality," that he accepted being called a "racist" if that meant not liking Muslims, that Muslims were pedophiles, that military servicemembers suffering from PTSD had "weak minds," and various other statements along those lines.

Higbie also used the word "shithole" in 2013 in almost exactly the same context that Trump used it last week, although this was apparently not enough to save his job.

Why are these bad things?

• A president who can't be bothered to appoint a competent drug policy team is basically saying he doesn't really care about the issue.

• Some of the people who voted for Trump might have felt differently if they'd known about six-figure hush money checks to porn stars over extramarital sex.

• It's not a good sign if a president's defense lawyer doesn't trust him not to commit perjury.

• A president who can't screen out flagrant, open racists from his administration is either incompetent or not that bothered by flagrant racism.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Wall funding. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump began retreating from his campaign mantra that Mexico would pay for his proposed border wall. But this week, he took the retreat a step further: not only would the United States pay for the wall, but it would pay for it out of money set aside from existing border patrol activities that actually work.

Clinton obsession. On Wednesday, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway went on CNN to make this claim: "We don't care about her. Nobody here [at the White House] talks about Hillary Clinton."

While that is probably true of most White House staff, Trump himself remains visibly preoccupied with Clinton. Just this Monday, he departed from a scripted speech to riff about how grateful he imagined agribusiness executives were that she wasn't president. He brought her up during his Thursday interview with the Wall Street Journal, publicly brags about his electoral college victory over her about every five days, and has tweeted about her at least 83 times since taking office.

"Good relationship" with Kim Jong-un. In that same interview, apparently granted as part of a week-long effort to portray Trump as mentally engaged and in command of his own staff in the wake of doubts raised by Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, Trump said this: "I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I have relationships with people, I think you people are surprised."

Trump has never spoken with Kim, and most of what has passed between them has been at the level of schoolyard insults. (Trump so enjoys using his most recent nickname for Kim, "little rocket man," that he seems unable to use the word "rocket" in any context without free-associating his way to North Korea.)

That said, there have been times when Trump has swerved to the other extreme, complimenting Kim for his ruthlessness in eliminating his political opposition and calling him a "smart cookie." This may have been what Trump was focusing on in his imaginary relationship with Kim.

This morning, the White House belatedly pushed back on the transcript of that interview, claiming that Trump had really said "I'd [I would] probably have a good relationship," which would make Trump merely ridiculously overconfident about the future rather than delusional about the present. Both the White House and the Wall Street Journal released audio. It is difficult to hear anything in either that supports Trump's claim.

Dianne Feinstein. On Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released transcripts from the Senate Judiciary committee's interview with the founder of Fusion GPS, the firm that hired former British intelligence officer and Russia expert Christopher Steele to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to the Putin regime. Republicans on the committee had refused to release it, in spite of the fact that it was not classified and Fusion GPS has been openly calling for it to be made public.

Trump lashed out at Feinstein in response:

The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found, would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace. Must have tough Primary!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 10, 2018

There are at least three lies in this, although as usual it is difficult to know when Trump is knowingly misleading or simply confused.

1. Feinstein has never said that there was "no collusion"--or, more accurately, no evidence of a criminal conspiracy against the United States between the Russian goverment and the Trump or his campaign. This is not the first time Trump has tried to put that claim in the mouths of, as he put it, "virtually every Democrat."
2. There is nothing illegal or "possibly illegal" about Feinstein's act.
3. As such, Feinstein did not need "authorization" to do what she did, either from the committee as a whole or (as he may have meant) from Trump himself, the subject of the investigations.

Poll bragging. In what is becoming an odd, if inadvertently honest, habit with him, Trump once again boasted about a poll that contained almost nothing but bad reviews of his presidency. On Thursday, he tweeted (correctly) that 66% of Americans said the economy was "excellent" or "good" in a recent Quinnipiac poll.

What he neglected to mention (and may not have been told by his staff) was that a majority of Americans credit President Obama rather than him for that good economy. Other findings in the same poll include:

• Americans believe that Trump is "not level-headed" by a 69-28% margin
• Almost twice as many Americans think he is "not honest" (63-34%)
• 65% of Americans think he does not "share their values," vs. 32% who do.
• His overall approval rating was 36%, with 59% of Americans disapproving of his performance in office.

Why do these things matter?

• Presidents who find themselves unable to keep their campaign promises shouldn't sabotage their own government's effectiveness just for appearances.

• It's bad when a president is obsessed with his enemies to the point that he's still talking about them more than a year after the election.

• Presidents who imagine relationships with hostile foreign powers that don't exist in reality aren't mentally fit for office.

• Evidence that doesn't say what you want it to won't convince anyone.

• Things are not illegal or "sneaky" just because they hurt a president politically.

• Past a certain point, cherry-picking poll numbers is evidence of either dishonesty (63%) or a pathological need for affirmation (69%).

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Love. On Tuesday, Trump predicted that Hispanic Americans would "fall in love" with him because Democrats were "doing nothing for DACA," the Obama-era policy that made children brought to the United States by noncitizen parents a low priority for immigration enforcement.

Trump is the one who ended DACA.

Lies. Trump's phenomenal unwillingness to tell the truth--or possibly his inability--is well established. But he also made news this week for a revelation that he had been lied to. According to a New York Times article published this week, Uttam Dhillon, a lawyer with the White House counsel's office, deliberately misled Trump about his legal authority to fire James Comey. Dhillon was (correctly) worried that such an action would be seen as obstruction of justice, exposing Trump to legal jeopardy and investigation. He falsely told Trump that he needed "cause" to fire Comey.

In fact, the director of the FBI can be fired by the president at any time and for any reason, or no reason. In the end, the deception didn't work: Trump simply ordered deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to write a report Comey, and then used it (without Rosenstein's knowledge or agreement) as the "cause" he thought he needed. 

It is a very serious breach of legal ethics to mislead a client, and even more so when the client is the presidency itself. But keeping information from Trump in order to keep him from endangering himself is a long-established practice among his employees. 

Lawyers. Since taking office, Trump has lashed out furiously at attorney general Jefferson Sessions, the FBI, and career officers in the Justice Department. The root of his anger seems to be his belief, on taking office, that their job was to legally protect him rather than apply the law to him. When Sessions recused himself from supervision of the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election--meaning that he could not protect Trump from it--Trump reportedly asked "Where's my Roy Cohn?"

Cohn was a lawyer best known for his work as Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings, during which Cohn was accused of various illegal unethical and illegal activities, including evidence tampering. Later in life, Cohn went to work for Trump, who described him as "vicious to others in his protection of me."

Wikileaks. During the campaign, Trump famously shouted "I love Wikileaks!" in response to their release of e-mails stolen by Russia from servers run by the Democratic National Committee. This was one of several different points of connection between the Trump campaign, Russia, and the site.

The love affair was renewed today when Wikileaks tweeted a link to a full-text copy of Fire and Fury, the book that provoked Trump to demand that he be recognized as a "very stable genius." Releasing the text of a book Trump loathes may not seem like a friendly act, but as a means of driving down sales, Wikileaks' foray into piracy will help Trump much more than it will hurt him.

The tactic of politically motivated piracy was perfected by the Kim Jong-Un regime in North Korea, which used cyber-attacks against Sony Pictures in retaliation for its anti-Kim comedy The Interview, including releasing free copies of Sony movies online.

Irony. It is quite common for the White House to request screenings of current movies, but the Trump White House's request to see the movie The Post is a little odd. The movie, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, is the story of the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham and their decision to publish the internal government report known as the Pentagon Papers. President Nixon ordered a secret (and illegal) campaign to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the analyst who released them. Nixon sued the Post and the New York Times to prevent the publication of the report, but also carried on a public feud with reporters, who he regarded as his "enemy."

Trump has spent much of the last week promoting some sort of event, apparently a mock awards ceremony, in which he will talk about his issues with the "fake news media."

Why do these things matter?

• Trump's 17% approval rating with Latino voters suggest that they have not yet started blaming other people for something he did.

• It's bad if the president needs to be tricked out of committing serious crimes.

• A president who thinks the attorney general is his personal criminal defense lawyer is incompetent.

• A president who needs the attorney general to act as his personal criminal defense lawyer is a disgrace.

• Roy Cohn and Julian Assange are poor role models for the President of the United States.

• Things are not "fake news" just because a president doesn't like them being talked about.

Sunday Monday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Christmas. He spent Christmas at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

In and of itself, there's no problem with this. Trump is entitled to spend holidays--or any days--at any of his six known private residences if he likes. (Roughly every third day of his presidency has been spent at a property he owns.)

But Trump had previously expressed the opinion that it was unforgivable for a president to spend the holidays away from Washington D.C., out of consideration for his Secret Service detail.

Chain migration. In one of the less coherent portions of his impromptu interview with the New York Times last Thursday, Trump appeared to be trying to speak on the subject of so-called "chain migration." The term refers to the fact that people who successfully go through the lengthy process of obtaining U.S. citizenship often sponsor other family members. Trump said:

We have to get rid of chainlike immigration, we have to get rid of the chain. The chain is the last guy that killed. … [crosstalk] … The last guy that killed the eight people. … [Inaudible.] … So badly wounded people. … Twenty-two people came in through chain migration. Chain migration and the lottery system. They have a lottery in these countries. They take the worst people in the country, they put ‘em into the lottery, then they have a handful of bad, worse ones, and they put them out. ‘Oh, these are the people the United States. …” … We’re gonna get rid of the lottery, and by the way, the Democrats agree with me on that. On chain migration, they pretty much agree with me.

Setting aside the question of whether Democrats agree with him on immigration policy (they emphatically do not), there's one problem with Trump's stance on chain migration: he wouldn't be an American without it. Both Trump's mother and paternal grandfather followed their siblings to the United States. His wife Melania, a Slovenian-born naturalized American citizen, has brought both her parents to live in the United States as well.

The NYT interview. Trump's free-form interview with the NYT's Michael S. Schmidt was alarming for a number of reasons, some of which the Times itself addressed the following day. Other reports characterized it as a "rambling" portrait of a "mind in denial," or "scary" in its depiction of a president who is "not well" or "delusional." Still others simply toted up the false, incoherent, or otherwise disturbing statements Trump made: CNN found 47, for example.

But perhaps no one was quite so horrified by the interview as the handlers who only found out about it while it was already in progress. Trump, relaxing in the dining room of his golf club after a round, simply granted Schmidt's request on the spot. One of Trump's own staff called the resulting interview "embarrassing," in spite of communication director Hope Hicks's belated attempts to cut it short.

Off the record, Trump's staff has been very candid about the problems that the less formal environment of Mar-a-Lago presents for their ability to, for lack of a better way of putting it, keep Trump under control.

For his own part, Trump was reportedly thrilled that the interview was a big TV news story the day after it broke.

Global climate change. On Thursday, during colder-than-average temperatures in much of the country, Trump took to Twitter to make a joke about "good old global warming," which he has called a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

There are two ways of approaching this. One is to "debate" Trump on the merits of whether cold weather anywhere means the overwhelming scientific consensus of human-driven climate change is some kind of conspiracy. For example, by showing that the globe as a whole was a full degree Fahrenheit warmer than average that day--a significant amount, but a fairly typical result lately.

But it's probably more relevant to point out that Trump himself almost certainly doesn't actually believe that climate change is a hoax. He's certainly crafted the image of a climate denier on Twitter in recent years for political purposes, but the White House is extremely cagey about his stance, consistently refusing to answer direct questions on the subject. That's because Trump gives a different answer every time he's asked, and has basically taken every stance in recent years.

Golf. After a morning spent on the links, the streak of consecutive days Trump has spent golfing after he declared on Christmas Day that it was time to go "back to work" is at seven.

Why are these bad things?

• Criticizing someone for doing something and then doing it yourself is hypocrisy, and it's not a good trait.

• There might be a long American history of each generation of immigrants wanting to slam the door on the next, but that doesn't make it right.

• It's a very bad sign if a president's staff doesn't trust him to have lunch without adult supervision.

• It's even worse if they're right to worry.

• Presidents need to actually know what they believe on major policy issues.

Sunday Week in Review, Denial edition

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

He issued--and existed in a state of--denial.

Russia warnings. It was reported this week that the Trump campaign (as well as the Clinton campaign) received a briefing warning them of the possibility that Russian intelligence agents would try to target them. The existence of the briefing is not really a surprise, but it does call into sharper relief the fact that the Trump campaign did not go directly to the FBI when approached by Russian contacts with the promise of "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. (Instead, they enthusiastically sent three of Trump's most senior confidants to a meeting, then attempted to conceal that it had taken place.)

Trump, who had previously categorically denied that there were ever any contacts between his campaign and Russia--an extravagantly false claim--denied this week that the briefing meant anything.

2017 elections. Still fuming over Roy Moore's loss in the Alabama Senate race, Trump took to Twitter on Monday to remind anyone still listening that the Republican party was not collapsing. "Remember, Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional Races this year. The media refuses to mention this," he wrote, referring to special elections. In fact, Republicans are 5-2 after Doug Jones' victory in Alabama and Jimmy Gomez' victory in the race for the seat vacated by Xavier Becerra (D-CA),

Setting that aside, however, the picture painted by those victories is fairly grim for the GOP under Trump. By a wide margin, the Democratic candidates in those safe Republican seats outperformed Hillary Clinton's vote share in their districts--and Clinton herself beat Trump in the popular vote.

The picture in state legislative special elections is even more dramatic. Democrats gained 11 seats over the course of 98 elections in 2017 to date. (A typical year sees about 70 special elections in state legislatures, and no year since 2011 has seen a partisan shift of more than three seats.)

2018 elections. These were some of the points made by Republican leaders in a "come to Jesus" meeting held Wednesday in the wake of the tax bill passing. (The timing of the meeting may have been intentional--Trump's aides have long since learned to take advantage of his mood swings by presenting bad news when he is in a good frame of mind.)

Trump's response to warnings of a "bloodbath" in 2018 has been to ask aides whether he is "getting enough credit for his accomplishments." (Presumably the answer he was looking for was "no.")

Petitioning the government for redress of grievances (suspended). On Tuesday, Trump shuttered the popular "We The People" online citizen petition page created by the Obama Administration and housed on the White House's website.

Under President Obama's rules, all petitions that reached a 100,000 signature threshold were supposed to received an official response by the White House within 30 days. Trump has not responded to any of the 17 such petitions that satisfied that requirement since he took office--probably because many of them were critical of him. Some of the qualifying petitions had called on Trump to release his tax returns, comply with ethics rules, or resign.

The Trump White House claims that closing the site will save $1.3 million, although it was not clear where this number came from. (The site itself would not cost that much to host if it received a hundred times the traffic it did.)

Haitians and Nigerians. Some of Trump's denials were more straightforward. Back in June, according to two sources within his own administration, Trump livened up a meeting on immigration with some observations about the kinds of people he believes are coming to the United States. Haitians, Trump said, "all have AIDS," and Nigerians would "never go back to their huts" once they'd seen the United States.

The Trump White House response: no, he didn't say that.

Why do these things matter?

• Presidents shouldn't conspire with foreign agents after being warned by the FBI not to conspire with foreign agents.

• A president's political problems aren't the most important things, but that doesn't mean that pretending they don't exist will make them go away.

• It's bad if a president is unwilling to hear criticism, or even suggestions, from citizens.

• Even if there isn't documentary proof one way or the other, it shouldn't be so plausible that a sitting president would say insanely offensive and racist things.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Voter suppression. It was revealed this week that all four Trumps who were registered to vote in the New York City mayoral election last month failed to do so legally.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner simply declined to vote--which may have been the wisest course of action, given the difficulty the rest of his family had in voting legally. His wife, Ivanka, attempted to vote, but mailed her absentee ballot on Election Day, which is too late. Melania Trump failed to sign the envelope, as is required, and had her vote rejected as well. And Donald Trump submitted his signed vote in a timely fashion, but with an error that, at least in theory, should have caused it to be rejected: he misstated his birthdate.

Trump claims that the only reason he lost the popular vote was that as many as five million people voted illegally (and exclusively) for Hillary Clinton. As a face-saving gesture, one of his first acts as president was to convene a commission to investigate "election integrity." Its vice-chair, Kansas politician Kris Kobach, rejected absentee ballots in Kansas from disabled persons physically unable to sign documents. That same commission includes being on the voter rolls in multiple jurisdictions under its definition of "voter fraud"--a situation that applies to almost any American who has moved in the last few years, including his daughter Tiffany, his Treasury Secretary, and Steve Bannon.

All-white advisors. Omarosa Manigault Newman, still best known for her villainous turn on the 2004 season of The Apprentice (and subsequently on Celebrity Apprentice), either quit or was fired from her White House job. Most of the media coverage focused on the drama around her exit: Manigault Newman was reportedly unpopular with other White House staff, and nobody (including her) was sure exactly what her job was.

But whether or not she was popular or useful, as the Director of Communications for the White House Public Liaison Office, she was the only African-American person who could even conceivably be called a senior advisor to Trump.

As a private citizen, Trump has been sued for refusing to rent his properties to African-Americans (twice), and again when he broke a contractual promise to the city of Gary, Indiana to hire citizens of that majority-black city. Trump was fined in 1992 for ordering black employees off the casino floor when he visited (a practice that dates back at least as far as the 1980s), and recently assumed that black reporter April Ryan was a personal friend of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and could set up a meeting with them.

Media meddling. Last month, Trump made headlines when he apparently leaned on his Justice Department to force the sale of CNN--the politically moderate news network he "hate-watches"--as a condition of approving a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which owns it.

This week, he called Rupert Murdoch, the owner of 21st Century Fox, to be reassured that the sale of Fox properties to Disney did not include Fox News--the right-wing news network that makes up the bulk of his reported 4-8 hours of daily TV-watching. (Much to Trump's relief, Fox News will not be part of the sale.)

Trump's Justice Department has not raised any objections to the $52.4 billion media consolidation deal.

Why are these bad things?

• In a functioning democracy, governments try to make it easier to vote, not harder.

• The most likely reason that a president has no black advisors is that he does not value the opinions of black people.

• It's bad if a president uses the powers of his office to reward friends and punish enemies.

Sunday week in review

What else did Donald Trump do today?

FBI. Trump's criticism of the FBI forced his directorial appointee, Christopher Wray, into the probably unprecedented position of defending the nation's federal police force against its own president. Wray sent FBI staff an e-mail expressing his support on Monday, and again in his testimony before Congress on Thursday.

Trump said last week that the reputation of the FBI was in "tatters," as part of a public relations campaign to discredit whatever it or its former director, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, may find regarding Russian interference on his behalf in the 2016 election. 

Novel legal theories. Donald Trump Jr. spent much of Wednesday behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee investigating Russia's attempts to get his father elected. By the rules of the committee, what he talked about isn't clear, but members can discuss with the press what he refused to talk about. Trump Jr. was unwilling to discuss a conversation he had with his father during the apparent attempt to cover up his June 2016 meeting with Russian agents--the ones who had provoked an enthusiastic response from him when they promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Since the nature of that conversation is likely to incriminate at least Trump Jr., his refusal to answer is not surprising. But the nature of his refusal is: he claimed that talking with his father was subject to attorney-client privilege.

Neither man is a lawyer.

What is in a name. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has not been expected to run for re-election in 2018, but Trump made efforts this week to get the 83-year-old into the race. The reason is that if Hatch doesn't run, one likely candidate to replace him is former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The two do not like one another: in March of 2016, when it still seemed possible to avert a Trump nomination, Romney gave a heavily publicized speech in which he called Trump a "phony," a "fraud," and a "con man"--among other things.

It was also revealed this week that when Trump appointed Mitt Romney's niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, to chair the Republican National Committee, he did so on the condition that she stop using her middle name in public.

Regulations. At his Pensacola rally for Roy Moore, Trump praised himself for his skill at cutting regulations--something he usually presents as a good thing no matter what regulations are being undone--and embellished it with an interesting if absurd claim: that only President Lincoln had come anywhere close.

It's not clear what, if anything, Trump had in mind by this beyond wanting to compare himself favorably to Lincoln--something he does a lot. One of the "job killing regulations" put in place by President Obama that Trump axed this week was one requiring airlines to fully disclose baggage fees to customers before a ticket is purchased.

The White House did not comment on how many jobs would be saved by surprise baggage fees.

Business. Trump's business empire expanded into Indonesia this week. Trump's name will go up over a proposed "six-star" hotel, golf course, and luxury resort, according to a report made this week.

This violates a promise Trump made shortly before taking office that he would not enter into "new deals" with foreign business interests. Trump remains the direct beneficiary of any money his businesses make, which makes lucrative deals like this an easy way to buy influence. But in his defense, it will not be any easier for Indonesia to do so than the Dominican Republic, Dubai and China, or any of the new foreign customers of his existing businesses that he now says it is too much trouble to keep track of.

Why are these bad things?

• A president who does not have faith in the integrity of his own government should leave it.

• Things a president does or says in possible furtherance of a crime are not secret just because he (or his son) really needs them to be.

• Making someone renounce their family name just to keep a job is a pretty shitty thing to do.

• Praising yourself for every accomplishment, no matter how dubious, is not a sign of good mental health.

• It's bad if a president doesn't keep his promises.

• It shouldn't be this easy to make it look like the President of the United States can be bought.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Racial slurs. On Monday, Trump once again referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as "Pocahontas." Trump has made the racial taunt--in reference to Warren's family history suggesting Cherokee and Delaware heritage--many times before, but this time it came as a sort of free-association during a ceremony honoring the Navajo "Code Talkers" of the second World War.

Native American groups were not amused, particularly because this latest use of the Powhatan woman's name as a slur distracted from what was supposed to be a celebration of Native American war heroes. 

Trump had a history of racial attacks on Native Americans long before Sen. Warren got under his skin. In 1993, he suggested that he had more "Indian blood" than the leaders of tribes who operated casinos in competition with him. He also said that the tribal organizations were fronts for organized crime, a claim he later worked into TV attack ads aimed at halting the construction of a new Mohawk casino that would compete with his.

Revisionist history. One of the defining moments of Trump's political career was the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. The release prompted an "apology" notable for its anger and defensiveness, but it did at least acknowledge that the tape was real: "I said it. It was wrong and I apologize." The statement was remarkable at the time because it was arguably the only time Trump had ever been known to publicly admit any sort of wrongdoing, much less give a grudging apology.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump has been telling people that he now believes the footage was somehow falsified. (It was not.)

As is often the case, it is hard to know whether Trump is deliberately lying, or has genuinely convinced himself to remember things differently. The Times piece cites Trump's own advisors, who admit that he "privately harbor[s] a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact," and that his changing view of the tape may be one of them. His advisors are not the only ones wondering lately about the extent to which Trump is fully engaged with reality.

On the other hand, Trump has been accused by at least sixteen individual women of sexual assault or harassment, not counting pageant contestants (some of them underage) who reported that he deliberately barged in on their dressing rooms while they were changing.

Diplomatic crisis. On Wednesday, Trump retweeted Islamophobic videos by an ultra-nationalist fringe group implicated in the murder of a British member of Parliament. When the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May expressed her disappointment, he immediately raged back at her on Twitter, telling her in so many words to mind her own business.

In short order, Trump was repeatedly denounced from the floor of Parliament. Language used in the House of Commons is often blunt by American political standards, but for a Member to say that a sitting American president was "either a racist, incompetent, or unthinking—or all three" is unprecedented in the last two centuries. By Friday, there were other consequences. The British government canceled a "working visit" where Trump was to ceremonially open an American embassy in London that had been scheduled for next month.

The "working visit" itself had been a compromise to avoid the massive protests that were expected if he were given the honor of a full state visit. (While a state visit was still on the table, Trump had been eagerly looking forward to it, specifically requesting a ceremonial carriage ride with the Queen.)

Meritocracy. In October, Trump declared a "public health emergency" on opioids--an act which freed up $57,000 to combat an epidemic of addiction which killed about 30,000 Americans in 2015. This is distinct from a declaration of a national emergency, which would have allowed the government to tap into the $13 billion FEMA budget.

On Wednesday, Trump appointed a "czar" to oversee the administration's efforts to combat the opioid epidemic: his former pollster and TV surrogate Kellyanne Conway.

What is so bad about these things?

• A president who can't control the impulse to make racial slurs at a ceremony honoring war heroes of that race is not mentally fit for office.

• Telling big lies in the hopes that people will believe you rather than their own ears is what authoritarians do.

• It's a problem if an American president is so toxic in our closest ally that he's blacklisted from even informal visiting.

• It's bad to appoint unqualified political operatives to manage a medical crisis.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Thankfulness. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders instituted a rule: before reporters could ask her a question, they had to say what they were thankful for. For the most part, the press corps played along, although ABC correspondent Cecilia Vega's pointed response, "the First Amendment," got a few appreciative hoots.

On Thanksgiving Day, Bloomberg reporter Margaret Talev attempted to ask Trump what he was thankful for. According to the press pool report, Talev "was then reprimanded by a member of the communications staff."

Self-promotion. Trump spent part of Thanksgiving Day with members of the Coast Guard, and he used that occasion, as well as a satellite broadcast to other military units worldwide, to salute what he saw as the source of the military's accomplishments: himself. Much of his speeches focused on how much better a job he regards himself doing than President Obama. Among his comments:

"We know how to win, but we have to let you win. You weren't winning before. They were letting you play even. We want to let you win.

"It's nice that you're working for something that's really starting to work."

"We're very very proud of you. Everybody in this country is watching and they are seeing positive reports for a change. Instead of the neutral and negative reports."

"They say we've made more progress against ISIS than they did in years of the previous administration, and that's because I'm letting you do your job."

As usual, Trump did not specify who "they" were. The main difference between Obama's and Trump's administration of the armed forces has been that Trump has essentially opted out of the actual job of the president, which is to act as the commander-in-chief. Instead, he has turned day-to-day control over operations to the Department of Defense, which allows him to shift blame to military commanders when things go wrong.


401(k)s. Trump packed a whole lot of confusion and deception into one sentence in particular of his Coast Guard address when he told his audience of servicemembers: "Your whole, long life, the stock market is higher than it's ever been. And that means your 401(k), all of the things that you have, whether it's -- even if you're in the military, you have a country that's really starting to turn."

One report says that Trump was pointing at a small child--perhaps one about nine years old, in which case his point about the stock market having been "higher than it's ever been" for the child's entire life is accurate but not the compliment to himself he probably meant. Since bottoming out in 2008, the major American indices have all been steadily higher. More broadly speaking, the same thing is true for the stock market since before the Great Depression.

Trump's apparent belief that Coasties are motivated by their "401(k)s" is also telling. Members of the military don't have them, but they do have access to a similar tax-advantaged defined-contribution program known as a Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Unlike most other federal or private-sector employees, most members of the military do not get their contributions matched, and contributions are capped at 5% of salary.

A typical chief petty officer (E-7) in the Coast Guard who made the maximum contribution last year to his or her TSP, and invested it in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, would be putting about $2,000 into the stock market and would have realized about $182 in gains since Trump's inauguration. This is slightly more than the $158 that would have been earned to date in a typical year--the average S&P 500 return is about 9.6%--and much less than the $605 that would have been returned between the day Barack Obama took office and Nov. 26, 2009.

As a rule, military servicemembers do not cite the fact that the TSP allows them to defer taxes on 5% their income as a reason for undertaking military service.

Net worth.  Trump's personal wealth has always been difficult to estimate, if only because he has openly admitted in the past to making up numbers based on his "feelings." (In his words, “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.") But according to an analysis published this week in Crain's New York Business, the sales figures reported by the Trump Organization (the main source of Trump's income) in the past were "flagrantly untrue" and over-reported its income by a factor of ten or more.

The difference is that this year, some details of Trump Organization finances are public because Trump holds public office, making its valuation less a matter of "feelings" and more a matter of actual money.

Ironically, while an S&P index fund won't make a big difference to the financial security of the typical Coast Guard member, Trump himself would apparently be much wealthier today if he had simply poured his enormous inheritance into one and played golf, rather than trying and frequently failing to make money himself. $40 million, which is a plausible estimate for how much money Trump had received from his father by 1974, would have yielded roughly $4 billion today.

Why are these bad things?

• A president should not be so afraid of the press that he sends his staff out to chastise them for asking questions about thankfulness on Thanksgiving.

• Even if a president thinks he, and not the military he commands, is responsible for military successes, saying so right in front of them is a pretty dickish thing to do.

• A president who thinks 401(k)s are what military personnel care about--or can even get through their military jobs--is dangerously out of touch.

• Past a certain point, lying in order to make yourself seem more accomplished becomes pathological.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Thoughts and prayers. On Tuesday (November 14th), Trump--traveling in Asia at the time--tweeted his condolences to the victims of a mass shooting.

The Sutherland Springs shooting, which killed 26 people in a Texas church, took place on November 5th. Trump was presumably trying to repurpose his Twitter-condolences from that mass shooting to the one that took place last Tuesday at a California elementary school, in which five people died.

Paying for lawyers. The Trump administration has been an enormous boon for the legal industry, with most or all of his campaign and senior White House staff obliged to hire counsel because of the ongoing Russia inquiries. Until recently, Trump--who claims to be a billionaire, although this is surprisingly difficult to verify--had been taking money from the Republican National Committee and campaign donations to pay his personal lawyers. But this week, Trump announced that he would begin paying for his own lawyers. (The RNC and the campaign will still be paying for his son Donald Jr.'s attorneys.)

But it wasn't all bad news for Trump: USAToday reported this week that taxpayers are footing the bill for lawyers for Trump's private businesses. Because Trump refuses to follow ethics rules (or, as it seems, the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution) by divesting from his businesses, he and his companies are being sued. Since Trump (as president) is taking the stance that he can do business with himself (as a business owner), the government is obliged to defend that position--and hence, Trump's private businesses--at taxpayer expense.

Mood management. Politico reported Saturday that Trump is shown flattering polls that focus specifically on Trump's political base and their relatively high support for his decisions. This seems to be a new twist on the infamous "propaganda document" of positive headlines and flattering photographs of himself that Trump famously received during the Reince Priebus era.

For all his complaining about "fake news suppression polls," Trump reportedly follows his numbers quite closely, and has been known to get upset over his lack of popularity. While the internal polls focused on people who are already inclined to support him may be psychologically soothing for Trump, the article quotes senior White House officials as saying that such polls are "delusional" and "just not accurate."

Impeachment. Also, articles of impeachment against Trump were filed in the House of Representatives this week. They are not expected to be politically viable until, at least, the Mueller investigation is further along. The White House press office has been responding, but it's not known whether Trump--who does not take bad news well--has been told.

Why are these bad things?

• Offering condolences for the wrong mass shooting is on the wrong side of a line of competency a president should never cross.

• It's bad if a president cares more about his private businesses' bottom line than in avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

• It's really bad if the only opinions a president cares about are the ones held by people shoring him up politically.

• A president should not be so easily manipulated.

• It's bad if there are plausible grounds for articles of impeachment less than a year into a president's term.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Bad news on Obamacare (in that there is good news). Trump suffered major setbacks this week in one of his main policy objectives: sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. Year-on-year enrollment numbers were up sharply in the first sign-up period on Trump's watch. Nobody predicted this--certainly not Trump, who has transitioned from declaring the law "dead" to chastising people for even bringing it up in his presence. Trump made an honest effort to bring about the ACA's "death spiral" all by himself--he'd cut the enrollment period in half and slashed public service ads by 90%--but to no avail, so far.

Adding insult to injury (for Trump, at least), the citizens of Maine voted by a 59-to-41 margin to participate in the Medicaid expansion program, a central part of the ACA. The success appears to have prompted other states to put Obamacare expansion on the ballot. Trump may take some consolation in the fact that Gov. Paul LePage (R), one of his staunchest supporters in the nations governor's mansions, has vowed to obstruct implementation of the referendum.

Golf course advertising. Trump has spent about a third of the days of his term in office so far visiting a Trump-branded property, most recently at a hotel in Hawaii en route to his Asia trip. He owns no hotels in South Korea (though his name is on some condominiums) and so couldn't cross-promote his business ventures there.

Instead, he did the next best thing--using his address before the South Korea National Assembly to plug his Bedminster, New Jersey golf course.

Praise for Xi. Trump's flip-flops on China are so frequent and cover so much territory that it's almost impossible to keep track of them. This week, the man who once accused China of economic "rape" of the United States was magnanimous about their trade policy, saying he didn't blame the country for doing its best for its citizens. (China has, for the most part, simply ignored Trump's ever-changing feelings about it, focusing instead on exploiting the chaos caused by the United States' sudden shift in trade policy under Trump.)

But his personal admiration for authoritarians has led to a chummy relationship with Chinese president Xi Jinping--or, in any event, Trump seems to have warm feelings for Xi. In advance of his visit to China, Trump congratulated Xi on his "great political victory."

That's a reference to Xi's recent re-election as General Secretary of the Communist Party, a more accurate description of his political power than the term "president" (a ceremonial post that Xi also holds). China has one-party rule and no direct elections of any senior government officials. Trump's praise for Xi's "great political victory" was really praise for Xi's skill in controlling a fundamentally undemocratic form of government.

What's the problem with these things?

• Presidents shouldn't openly try to sabotage the laws they're sworn to uphold.

• A president who uses an address to a major ally's legislature to plug his side businesses has the wrong priorities.

• It's bad if the President of the United States is constantly praising authoritarians and antidemocratic forms of government.

Sunday Week in Review, self-reflection edition

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

He shared some of his thoughts on the subject of Donald Trump.

He's not mad. In the midst of the fallout from the double-barreled Mueller investigation news, which saw his campaign chair indicted for conspiracy against the United States, and his foreign policy advisor plead guilty to lying to the FBI about meeting with Russia on behalf of the campaign, Trump was calm.

We know this because he called the New York Times on Wednesday to announce that he was calm. “I’m actually not angry at anybody,” Trump said in the unsolicited interview.

That having been said, Trump may want to inform the dozens of sources from inside his own administration who have repeatedly described his reaction to the Mueller probe as "fuming," "seething" (a word used more than once), or "freaking out."

He's quite popular. In the same call, Trump reminded the NYT of his enduring popularity, saying, “I just got fantastic poll numbers." This came shortly after he hit record lows in both the benchmark Gallup and NBC/Wall Street Journal polls.

He's perfect. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked on Wednesday what Trump's flaws are. "Probably that he has to deal with you guys on a daily basis," she responded. Pressed for a serious answer after polite chuckles from the press corps, Sanders grew serious and said "I just gave you one" and moved on to the next question.

Sanders cannot be accused of putting words in Trump's mouth: he has never, to all appearances, ever identified anything he is deficient in. (The list of things he considers himself the best at is somewhat longer.) 

He matters.  Asked by a Fox News interviewer on Thursday whether his failure to address the critical shortage of State Department personnel was hurting his agenda, Trump had this reassuring response: "Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I'm the only one that matters."

Why do these things matter?

• Whether they are presidents or adolescent children, people who are not upset rarely if ever call people up to declare that they are not upset.

• A president at 33% approval is in no sense of the word popular.

• Inability to acknowledge any possible criticism is not a sign of good mental health.

• While nobody doubts the sincerity of Trump's belief that only he matters, the belief itself is not a good sign.

Sunday Week in Review, DO SOMETHING edition

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

SOMETHING. Or did he?

He filed his taxes? Monday of this week was the day that Trump's routine extension for filing his 2016 taxes expired. Presumably he met this deadline. As Trump has resolutely refused to release any information whatsoever about his taxes, breaking with a precedent stretching back to Watergate, there is no way to know.

He remembered the name of the soldiers whose families he was consoling? The scandal around Trump's botched condolence calls for the soldiers who were killed in Niger on October 6th is now reorienting around the question of why they were put at risk in the first place (see below). But Trump seemed eager to rehash the question of whether Sgt. La David Johnson's widow, Myeshia Johnson, was a liar for saying that Trump was insensitive and didn't seem to know who he was talking about in the hastily-arranged phone call.

This Wednesday, Trump declared to reporters that he was telling the truth (and Myeshia Johnson was not) because he has "one of the all time great memories." And just in case his all-time great memory failed him, Trump also said that the soldier's full name was spelled out on a chart for him.

Trump has claimed to have a great memory before, although he promptly forgot ever having made that claim when it came up in a deposition related to his fraudulent Trump University business.

He took responsibility for authorizing the Niger mission that came under attack? Sgt. Johnson was killed during the same mission that claimed the lives of SSgt. Bryan Black, SSgt. Dustin Wright, and SSgt. Jeremiah Johnson. They were in Niger as part of a counterterrorism force training and assisting the Nigerien military, and had gone on many such combat patrols in the past. But circumstances had recently changed: a crucial element in the overall anti-ISIS forces in the region, the military of neighboring Chad, had been abruptly withdrawn. Some suspect that this was done in retaliation for Trump's seemingly inexplicable decision to add Chad to his travel bans.

Asked on Wednesday if he had authorized the mission, Trump passed the buck to the people he tends to refer to as "my generals." (This is not the first time that Trump has sought to avoid responsibility for orders that cost American lives.) It is not uncommon for the fine-grained details to be left to the discretion of professional military commanders. It is unusual for a president to abdicate all strategic oversight of a theater in which American military personnel are in harm's way.

He was elected with the help of Cambridge Analytica? This week, CNN reported that Cambridge Analytica--the data-mining political consultancy credited with engineering Trump's narrow electoral victory--had been caught asking Wikileaks for the e-mails he believed had been stolen from Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server. (There is no evidence Clinton's private server was ever hacked, and no e-mails from it have ever been released. Wikileaks did publish e-mails stolen by Russian intelligence agencies from the Democratic National Committee, which prompted Trump to declare "I love Wikileaks!")

In other words, yet another element of the Trump campaign was revealed to be interested in what Russian spies could do for them.

Immediately, Trump surrogates began erasing Cambridge Analytica from its previously vaunted place in the Trump mythology. This is a fairly common practice in the Trump world: as figures close to him are implicated in Russia's interference in American elections, they are retroactively expunged from the story of Trump's rise to power. Paul Manafort, who sat at the very top of the Trump campaign org chart for months and is a known target of the Mueller investigation, was reimagined as having played "a very limited role." En route to pushing Steve Bannon out of the White House, Trump himself deleted months of his closest advisor's influence from history when he asserted that Bannon "was not involved in my campaign until very late." Michael Flynn, who became the first person forced out of the Trump administration when he was caught lying about his contacts with Russian agents, was reinvented as an Obama administration holdover, notwithstanding the fact that President Obama fired Flynn in 2013. 

Both Bannon and Flynn were on the payroll of Cambridge Analytica, although Flynn concealed his involvement until recently.

Why are these things important?

• Presidents do not get to hide behind the military for the consequences of the tasks they give the military.

• Trying to erase politically awkward subordinates from history is what authoritarians do.

• It's bad if getting the last word in an argument with a grieving military widow is any kind of a priority for a president.

• A president who ignores attacks on the United States is aiding and abetting attacks on the United States.